Krotoszyński Michał, Transitional Justice and the Constitutional Crisis: The Case of Poland (2015–2019)

During the last four years the situation in Poland was a matter of interest to the worldwide legal community mostly due to the constitutional crisis. Its focal point were the relations between the government and the judiciary, mainly the Constitutional Tribunal (CT) and the Supreme Court (SC). Yet, the years 2015–2019 were also a time of a revival of transitional justice measures, such as cleansing the public sphere of communist symbols, remodelling of lustration legislation, and further reduction of pensions of communist secret service employees and officers. As parts of these provisions were either ambiguous or debatable from a constitutional point of view, the controversies were resolved primarily in administrative and ordinary courts.

In this paper I argue that these spheres are interconnected and that Poland’s constitutional crisis has a transitional justice dimension. In order to prove it, I start with an overview of retrospective instruments dealing with the communist past, which...